


Prince of the Pipers

by Eggling



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death, and trauma following on from that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 08:50:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15021026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eggling/pseuds/Eggling
Summary: Jamie, son of Donald McCrimmon. A piper, like his father and his father's father.- The HighlandersHow Jamie came to take over the role of clan piper from his father.





	Prince of the Pipers

Jamie is seventeen when his father first mentions the war to come.

“They’ll be on their way home soon,” is all he says, but the heaviness in his voice is familiar to Jamie. It is the same one he uses when he speaks of the other risings, of the injustices that have been done to them, of all they have lost.

“Does it feel like it did before?” he asks eagerly, fingers curling around the chanter.

“They say the Prince wore the tartan to a ball,” his father tells him. “Think of that. Scotland freed, the king crowned again all in plaid, and us there to see it!”

Jamie is not sure if he believes in it as his father does – the king over the water, six times defeated, and the saviour prince barely older than he is himself. But the image still makes his heart leap, and he clutches the chanter hard enough to whiten his knuckles. “Will I be ready for it?”

His father chuckles. “Not with your fingers like that, laddie.” Embarrassed, Jamie straightens his fingers, pulling the bag out from under his arm, preparing to begin playing again. “Aye, you’ll be ready.” He pulls his bonnet low over his forehead as he heads off down the hill, as if readying himself for battle. “Lesson’s over, I’ve other students to teach. Keep practising the crunluath. We cannae have sloppy embellishments when the Prince is here, can we?”

“No,” Jamie calls after him dutifully, but as soon as his father is out of sight, he lets his pipes fall to the ground. He sits down heavily on a rock, staring out at the landscape before him. For all his doubts about the Prince, the way his father had spoken makes the world seem to brim with possibility, as if oats would spring out of the ground of their own accord, growing tall enough to obscure the faraway smudges of smoke on the otherwise pristine horizon. He glowers down at them, as if hoping that the mere thought of the Prince would chase the Black Watch back home to their own clans. _The Prince will come_ , he tells himself. _He’ll come home, and we’ll play the pipes for him, and he’ll make the grain grow again, and we won’t have to fight anymore_.

He sits on the ridge, looking over his home, and dreams of freedom.

* * *

“Where’s my father?”

Jamie feels terribly small again, like he’s a small child tugging at the hem of Alexander’s kilt. It is clear that Alexander sees it too, from the way he looks down at him pityingly and says “they took him.”

He is dimly aware of his legs threatening to give way. His whole body seems to be wracked with shudders, his lungs three sizes too big for his chest and impossibly tight, like he is trying to play a high note when the reed is too hard. _That’s alright_ , a voice in his head tells him. _We’ll just take it out and cut it down a bit, that’ll fix it_. But his father is _gone_ , and he has nobody to tug the chanter open and take out the broken bits and set them to rights, only his own shaking, too-weak hands. He wants to cry, to scream, to shove Alexander to the ground and yell _he’s your piper, how could you have lost him like that? How could you have lost my father?_ , but the horror of it has frozen him in place.

Somehow, he realises that his expression is calm, composed. It has to be, he tells himself sternly. His father could stand before a battle and play without missing a single gracenote, all while watching the sickening bloodshed unfold. That job is his now. “Will ye get him back?”

Alexander shakes his head. “Not unless the redcoats let him go.” He smiles, patting Jamie on the shoulder in a rough sort of reassurance. “He’s got a good chance. Even they couldnae hold the king of the pipers for long in good conscience.”

“No.” _Is this what being a piper is?_ Jamie wonders. “S’pose ye need me tae do his job now.” _It’s not about the pipes at all. It’s about seeing so many people killed that you can stomach it, and you can keep playing through it all._

“Come and play us a jig,” Alexander suggests bracingly. “The men want to celebrate the victory.”

“Victory?” What victory could there be, he wonders, when his father is gone?

“Aye.” Alexander is looking down at him incredulously. “Did ye not know? We drove them off, an’ took about fifty prisoners to boot.”

His careless words make the gutting loss cut ever deeper. It takes Jamie a moment to realise that he is shaking his head. “I couldnae,” he said. “No’ until we get him back.”

* * *

The first shock comes a few days later.

He is crouched in front of a frosted-over puddle, struggling to shave with the distorted reflection, when Alexander claps him on the shoulder. The blade slips out of his hand, nicking his cheek, and he curses, scrabbling to pick it up.

“I don’t know why you’re bothering, lad,” Alexander says, apparently unconcerned by the blood dripping down Jamie’s face.

_Typical_ , Jamie thinks. Nobody seemed to have noticed the grief ripping into him like so many knives. Why should they notice a wound on the outside, either?

“I might as well do it now,” he says evasively. He knows precisely what this is about, but he would rather not have to say it. “I dinnae ken when I’ll have another chance.”

“You’re the man of the family now,” Alexander says brusquely, shattering any attempt he might have made at pretence. “Men don’t have tae shave.”

“I’m no’ the man of my family yet.” Jamie sits back on his haunches, staring determinedly up at Alexander. “He’s going tae come back. And he’s no’ going tae find me in his place.”

“How long are ye gonnae believe that? A week? A month?”

“As long as it takes,” Jamie spits back through gritted teeth. He stands up, back military-formation straight, suddenly conscious of the fact that Alexander is both bigger than he is and the son of his laird. “Do ye think we could rescue him?”

“Leave the army an' break into the redcoats’ jail?” Alexander snorts. “I’ll not risk the lives of more men. No’ for that.”

“Ye think he’s dead, don’t ye?”

“I’d like tae think he isnae. You’re no’ the only one who’d like him back, laddie.” Alexander lets out a deep breath as if bracing himself. “Aye, I do. All of them who’ve been taken. The longer they keep them, the less I think they’re alive.”

Anger surges in Jamie’s chest at his apathy. “I could go,” he argues. “They might not notice me, I could let everyone out -”

“No!” Jamie shrinks back, startled. “We’ve lost one piper. We cannae afford tae risk losing another.” Alexander brushes past him, heading back towards the camp. “It’d be more than your life’s worth tae try.”

Warm blood is trickling down Jamie’s cheek and onto his plaid. He brushes it away, but more beads spring up from the scratch, dripping down incessantly as if replacing the tears he refuses to let the others see him shed.

* * *

Someone tells him that the other pipers refuse to play just as he does, silent in protest of the loss of their leader. It feels meaningless, though he knows they must be hurting too.

He says nothing, just nods. He has become too skilled at hiding his own grief to show anything but empty acceptance.

* * *

Deep down, he had believed his father would come back before the next battle. That he would be left standing safely behind with the pipes, not charging into battle with the other men.

He should have known that he would not be so lucky.

The army cannot spare a sword, so when he hands his pipes to the boy acting as his attendant, he draws his dirk instead. It seems strangely heavy, as if already weighed down by blood, but he finds himself unconcerned. He feels far away from himself, as if the war has been a dream, and he is still sitting on the ridge, gazing out across his home by the river. As if the endless possibilities of the rising still stretched out before him. As if his father had not been taken.

When the order is given to charge, the war cry of his clan is on his lips, and the thought of the others the redcoats have hurt is in his heart.

* * *

The battle is done.

He stares down at his knife, half washed clean of blood by the water that pools amongst the tufts of tough grass. The land is familiar, so close to his own home, and yet alien, scarred by the gore and gunfire of battle. _Did I kill someone?_ he wonders. _Did I ever?_ He has been in many charges by now, and dreamt of yet more, and his mind has forgotten how to distinguish between the two. Was the sickening crunch of an enemy’s skull crumpling beneath a blow real or imagined? Does it matter?

“Jamie!” Alexander is splashing across the blood-muddied ground towards him. “The laird’s hurt!”

He raises his head slowly, blinking up at Alexander as if he has been stunned. “Where’s my pipes?” he says, slowly, clumsily. “I left them -”

“Och, dinnae worry about your pipes now.” Alexander is pulling him up roughly and shoving him across the moor, and he is too weak to struggle. “The redcoats will have broken them by now. We have tae get the laird out of here.”

Somehow, after all the chaos and bloodshed and horror, amongst the constant musket fire and the screams of dying men and fleeing women, all Jamie’s mind can focus on is his pipes. “I left them,” he repeats.

“The lad you gave them to got shot down,” Alexander growls, taking him by the wrist and dragging him onwards. For the first time, Jamie resists, as if wanting to search the moor until he finds them. “We can’t go back for them now.”

“Oh.” Distantly, he remembers his father handing him those pipes, then charging off into the battle that had taken him away – and before that, being handed them during a battle for the first time. _These pipes belonged to my father_ , he had said. _One day they’ll belong to you. Keep them safe_. But he had lost them, just as he had lost his father. Alexander was right. By now they were surely just another piece of broken debris littering Drumossie moor.

“Hurry up!” Alexander shoves him forwards. “We cannae leave Kirsty tae look after him alone.”

Ironic, he thinks, that Alexander should be begging for his help to save his own father now. He dips his fingers inside his plaid, feeling the smooth wood of the chanter, grounding himself. “Aye, I’m goin’,” he says at last. “Where are they?”

* * *

He takes to reading with an enthusiasm that surprises the Doctor, Ben, and Polly. They write it off as an eagerness to learn, and in a sense they are right – but there is one particular piece of missing knowledge that drives him.

It takes him a long time to work up the courage to ask the Doctor where to find the right book. The Doctor’s hasty reply, half-mumbled into a book of his own - “oh, try the nine hundreds, that should have what you want. It’s beside the pot plants, you know” - had reassured him a little. At least the others would have no suspicion of where he was going or why, and no reason to worry.

He finds the books easily enough, a dusty record of a history he has lived. It takes a few tries to find a book that will tell him what he wants to know, and what little he sees as he browses makes his stomach turn. To read about his own memories, stained red with the blood of hundreds, on crisp, dispassionate white paper is almost enough to make him cast the books aside and leave, but for all the shudders running through him, his grip remains steady and firm. He has played through half the books the battles the books describe to him, seen the horrors their authors can only imagine, and all without skipping the smallest gracenote. Just as his father did. He has witnessed too much for his hands to falter now.

At last, he opens the right book. A lone fragment of hope rattles around inside his frantically beating heart. _Maybe it wasnae so bad_ , he tells himself. _Maybe they let him go_.

He turns the page.

_Guilty by association_ leaps off the paper towards him, shooting like a musket ball through his chest and out the other side, taking that glimmer of hope with it. The impact is so tangible that he almost imagines it could make him stagger backwards. _Guilty by association_. Rereading the words makes the floor spin beneath him. He knows already, does not have to read further to know what happened to his father. _Instrument of war_. He wonders if he had been killed before the Doctor had even set foot on Drumossie moor. If he had ever even reached the redcoats’ prison. If there had ever been anything he could have done.

The emptiness is something he has not felt with such clarity since the night his father was taken. His lungs are aching again, as if he has been playing his pipes for too long, and his father would come and scold him for half-suffocating himself – but he has no pipes, and no father. Just a chanter, pulled away from its rightful place and set adrift and never quite enough to recapture the right sound. The way it fits makes him want to laugh, but there is something stuck in his throat, and he wonders if he will ever be able to breathe freely again. Distantly, he wonders how precisely the loss had happened – if they had allowed him the dignity of a quick death, or if he had been left to choke his life away on the end of a rope. He wonders if his hands had been steady until the end.

For the first time in months, his own hands fail him, and he lets the book fall.


End file.
